Thunder, Tariffs and Other Wonders
With two weeks to go before the midterm elections, Trump is trying everything he can to win back support. Between phantom cheques, imaginary electoral fraud and deals with the Kremlin, even the gods of Olympus seem to have lost patience: on the prediction market Polymarket, Democrats have a 63% chance of winning both chambers of Congress.
There is a reason Greek mythology never goes out of fashion: it is a permanent archive of humanity’s worst instincts, and proof that our evolution, at least when it comes to megalomania, stopped in the earliest days of civilisation. Its stories are archaic algorithms showing how the great delusions of power have remained remarkably unchanged, from the Greek Dark Ages to social media. Myth takes the derangement of a single deluded egomaniac and turns it into a universal template for all future propaganda, anticipating the defining features of modern populism with almost disarming sarcasm.
Take Salmoneus, king of Elis, afflicted with a spectacular case of hubris and delusions of omnipotence. After repeatedly telling his subjects that he was the only Zeus, he eventually came to believe it himself, becoming the first illustrious victim of his own fake news. From the outset, he stage-managed the whole performance with the zeal of a showman.
According to mythographic tradition, he had a bronze bridge built and drove his chariot across it at full speed; he attached animal hides and cauldrons behind it so that the rumbling would imitate the crash of thunder. He added visual effects to the sound effects: to mimic divine lightning bolts, he hurled flaming torches into the sky. Then, pushing his arrogance beyond all limits, he ordered that the sacrifices and offerings intended for Zeus be brought to him instead.
Virgil places him in Tartarus in Book Six of the Aeneid, describing him as demens — mad. He then applies a phrase that ought to be carved above the entrance to every press room: non imitabile fulmen. The thunderbolt that cannot be imitated.
Three thousand years later, the megalomaniac king has replaced the bridge with an account on Truth Social, and all he needs are cameras and a smartphone to unleash thunder and lightning in abundance. The din arrives in real time, like bolts hurled across the globe. The saga of Donald Trump is now Salmoneus’s story in digital form and on a big-budget scale. With one notable improvement: he collects myths the way other people collect stamps. Depending on the promise, Trump embodies a different myth from ancient Greece: Salmoneus, Midas, Tantalus. Like all of them, he fails to see that challenging the gods, or the forces that hold the universe together, always ends in tragedy.
On Wednesday, 9 September 2026, from the stage at the American Airlines Center in Dallas, during the first-ever Republican midterm convention, Trump added a new special effect to his repertoire: $5,000 for every adult American citizen, but only if Republicans retain control of both the House and the Senate in the 3 November elections. He called it the Trump dividend. The trick is to make enough noise to convince everyone the lightning is real.
On Saturday, 3 October 2026, one month before the midterms, Trump revived his $5,000 promise on Truth Social: “Only I can make you this promise.” The money, he claims, will come from tariffs and economic growth. To back up the claim, he brandishes $21 trillion in investments supposedly committed to the United States over fifteen months, a figure that available fact-checks have been unable to trace to investments actually made. Meanwhile, the federal debt keeps growing.
Voters are subjected to Tantalus’s torment, fiscal edition. This is not his first promise of money: in 2025, Trump floated a $2,000 dividend funded by tariffs and, earlier, a $5,000 bonus tied to savings generated by DOGE. Neither proposal resulted in the announced payment. On 2 October 2026, meanwhile, the White House announced a one-off payment of $90 to more than 20 million Medicare Part B enrollees, funded through the Medicare Improvement Fund. More announcements, more figures, more recipients: promises still to be verified alongside one limited, concrete payment, a month before the polls open.
Trump seems to be betting on how quickly a new promise can replace the previous one, how difficult it is to tell an announcement from a result, and whether voters will bother to question the numbers. He only has to believe they are still willing to take his word for it.
Salmoneus faked thunder and lightning to make people believe he was Zeus. Trump tosses coins at polling stations and promises billions to make people believe he is God.
Midas and the Gods’ ATM
But special effects, as we know, come at a price, and to pay for them Trump has to change masks.
When faced with the most down-to-earth question of all — who pays? — the answer arrives right on cue, delivered by television strategists: tariffs.
In Trump’s cosmology, tariffs work like a divine ATM: you insert a foreign-made product and out come American dollars, without a single citizen having to enter a PIN. The catch is that the card belongs to US importers, who pass part of the bill on to businesses and consumers. The gods’ ATM charges the wrong account.
This is the wish of Midas, the Phrygian king who asked for everything he touched to turn to gold and discovered too late that gold was not edible. Midas at least had the decency to realise it when the food reached his plate.
Let’s do the sums, the least spectacular part of the story. There are about 245 million adult US citizens: $5,000 each comes to $1.225 trillion, to be paid out in a single year. Five thousand dollars has weight, substance, even a psychological effect. $1.225 trillion is an abstract figure, large enough to stop looking like money and start looking like stage scenery.
Tariff revenue, however, does not print cheques on demand. According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, as cited by FactCheck.org, tariffs generate less than $200 billion a year: it would take more than six years to finance just one year of those payments. And that revenue is already factored into budget projections. Diverting it to dividends would mean giving up using it to reduce the deficit or cover other spending.
Midas’s ATM, then, has one small flaw: it cannot dispense money that does not exist. And the gold Trump has promised risks turning, once again, into a mountain of debt.
In the real world of American jurisprudence, the miracle crashed into the Constitution. On Friday, 20 February 2026, by six votes to three, in the case of Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, the Supreme Court ruled that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) did not authorise the president to impose those tariffs. The majority rejected an interpretation that would have turned a law designed to address economic emergencies into a virtually unlimited delegation of tariff-setting power.
Of the roughly $166 billion collected under IEEPA, a substantial share is now subject to refunds to importers. According to data from US Customs and Border Protection submitted to the Court of International Trade, as of 21 August 2026, accepted claims being processed amounted to around $132.5 billion; of that sum, $106.6 billion had already been certified and sent to the Treasury for payment. For once, the gods’ ATM really did dispense money. To importers. In June alone, the Treasury refunded $49.2 billion, more than twice the $23.6 billion collected in new tariffs that same month, and the federal deficit for June rose to $120 billion. Americans are therefore paying for tariffs twice: first, partly through prices; then through the public debt used to finance the refunds. The cheques Trump promised never arrived. The bill did.
America’s cost-of-living crisis bears Trump’s signature. Tariffs, later ruled unlawful by the Supreme Court, pushed importers and retailers to raise prices to recoup their costs. Now, precisely because those tariffs were unlawful, the money is going back to importers with interest, even when customers had already paid those costs at the checkout. Businesses collect twice; consumers pay twice. In February, Trump added his war on Iran to an already hefty bill, sending diesel prices to record highs.
On Saturday, 18 July 2026, Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei described Trump’s signature as “utterly worthless and devoid of credibility”, accusing Washington of repeatedly violating the memorandum of understanding with Tehran. It was a self-interested statement from one of the parties to a conflict, but it offered a distinctly unflattering assessment of the American president’s reliability. The Treasury could print it on banknotes: at least this time, the face value would be guaranteed.
On the Canadian front, too, the numbers tell a different story from the one imagined at the White House. According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted from 28 to 30 August 2026 and published on 1 September, 57% of Americans oppose additional tariffs on Canada, while just 20% support them.
As for Greenland, annexation was left out of the agreement reached with European allies. The idea of Canada becoming the fifty-first state, meanwhile, survives in a January 2026 Research Co. poll: only 17% of Americans would like Canada to become a US territory or state. Not exactly an imperial plebiscite.
The Coup That Incinerated Salmoneus
When the polls turn against him, Trump slips back into the mask of Salmoneus. The king usurped Zeus’s rituals and appropriated the sacrifices intended for the god. Zeus incinerated him. In a democracy, the ultimate sacrifice is the vote: Trump has devoted his second term to building the tools needed to bend it to his will.
The dress rehearsal dates back to 2020: fake electors, pressure on Mike Pence, the assault on the Capitol on 6 January 2021. After Trump’s re-election, the federal cases against him over his attempts to overturn the result were closed. On Wednesday, 9 September 2026, in Dallas, Trump declared that he had won the presidency three times. Americans remember two.
Trump continues to embrace his own version of 2020, as though repeating it often enough could make it true. The ballots in Fulton County have been recounted and reviewed several times: in Georgia, Joe Biden won by 11,779 votes.
The operation began on day one. On Monday, 20 January 2025, Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of those convicted over the Capitol attack, also ordering the closure of the federal proceedings still pending. On Tuesday, 25 March, he signed an executive order to rewrite part of the federal voting rules, including a requirement for documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections. In November, he then pardoned more than 75 allies involved in attempts to overturn the 2020 result, including the so-called fake electors. On Wednesday, 28 January 2026, the FBI seized more than 650 boxes of ballots and election documents from Fulton County. On Monday, 2 February, Trump urged Republicans to “nationalize” the vote. In September, the Justice Department stepped up investigations into non-citizen voting, while Homeland Security claimed 160 arrests. The bronze bridge is ready.
The thunder was all that was missing. In September, the official figures arrived: about 1,600 investigations and 160 arrests over alleged irregularities involving non-citizen voting, out of more than 211 million registered voters. More than 150 million Americans voted in 2024. So far, the alarm over mass fraud has produced fewer than one arrest per million registered voters. We still do not know whether those arrests will lead to convictions or turn out to be yet more abuses targeting immigrants.
When the person crying fraud is a friend, the FBI shows up with bolt cutters. On 2 June 2026, Clint Curtis, the top election official in Shasta County, a Trump stronghold in California, lost the primary: Joanna Francescut beat him with 58% of the vote. On 2 July, Curtis certified the result. Then he began casting doubt on the very election he had just signed off on: some ballots, he claimed, felt and smelled different from usual. He locked them away and called the FBI. In September, after a federal grand jury subpoena, agents cut the lock. So far, no evidence of counterfeit ballots. For a Republican who loses, casting doubt is enough: it costs less than admitting defeat. On 3 November, he will still be overseeing the county’s elections.
The stage is already set for November. Of 37 election administration experts consulted by Votebeat in spring 2026, more than three-quarters considered it at least fairly likely that Trump would ask the National Guard or federal agents to seize voting equipment after the election. Twenty-seven of the 37 thought a federal or military presence at polling stations at least fairly likely. The bridge reaches all the way to the ballot boxes.
A ruler who declares himself the winner before the count, ballots seized, officials threatened, accomplices pardoned. Salmoneus was struck by lightning for far less.
Tantalus Goes to the Kremlin
Thunder, gold and ballots are of little use if filling the tank costs too much. With two weeks to go before the vote, Trump is looking for fuel in the one place no American president had turned to since 2022: the Kremlin.
On Friday, 9 October 2026, after a phone call with Vladimir Putin, he announced the arrival of more than 300,000 tonnes of Russian diesel: about 2.25 million barrels, half a day’s worth of US consumption, and even that is to be shared with the rest of the world. Washington has authorised imports through 7 April 2027. The election is on 3 November.
In Tartarus, Tantalus stands immersed up to his neck in a lake. When he bends down to drink, the water recedes; when he reaches for the fruit, the wind lifts the branches out of reach. American motorists know the torment: relief is always just a hand’s breadth away, while the price at the pump keeps creeping higher. Trump offers them half a day’s worth of diesel and calls it a cure.
Thirst, however, was only the punishment. Tantalus’s crime had been committed at the dinner table: he invited the gods to a feast and served them his own son, Pelops. Trump has taken his seat at the Kremlin’s table and put Ukraine on the plate.
Kyiv has been cast as Pelops: served up without being invited. Washington wants Ukraine to stop striking Russian refineries and, according to Ukrainian and European officials, has threatened to reduce intelligence sharing. On Wednesday, 14 October, access to Starshield, the satellite system Kyiv uses to communicate with troops at the front and guide drones, was restricted. The White House denied any involvement; two US officials subsequently confirmed to Reuters that the order had come from the White House itself. Putin sells the diesel, while Kyiv is told to spare the refineries that produce it.
On Saturday, 10 October, Trump had already found the culprit for high fuel prices: Ukraine. Zelensky had “better damn well stop” bombing Russian refineries, he declared, and Kyiv needed a new president. The fact that diesel prices were at their highest since the war with Iran, launched by Trump himself in February, was a minor detail. That same day, a Russian attack on Zaporizhzhia killed twenty people, three of them children.
In ancient Greek cities, times of calamity called for a pharmakos: a scapegoat driven beyond the city walls, carrying all the community’s sins with them. Trump has chosen Ukraine: the invaded country, guilty of failing to let itself be invaded in peace.
On Thursday, 15 October, a Ukrainian drone struck the Ryazan refinery, one of Russia’s largest. Trump called it a “disgrace”. For the first time since the war began, Russian state television broadcast footage of a refinery under attack. Moscow and Washington have found themselves a joint press office.
Social media takes care of the rest. According to US intelligence assessments reported by the New York Times in September, the Kremlin has approved a new disinformation campaign for the midterms. Companies that monitor online propaganda have watched it unfold: AI-generated versions of Hollywood actors deployed against Democrats in the tightest Senate races, fabricated corruption scandals targeting Cory Booker and John Hickenlooper, fake Reuters, Washington Post and Fox News websites filled with articles nobody ever wrote. Another Russian operation promoted the diesel deal. So far, nothing against Republican candidates.
Someone in Congress has noticed. On Sunday, 11 October, three Republican senators — Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and Thom Tillis — signed a statement with Democrats calling on the president to reverse course: a law prohibits Russian energy imports for as long as the aggression against Ukraine continues. By Tuesday, 13 October, there were twelve signatories, six of them Republicans. That same day, a journalist asked Trump whether anyone had explained to him that Russia could use the money to buy more bombs.
Two days later, television showed how it is done. On Thursday, 15 October 2026, as the fourth season of The Diplomat arrived on Netflix, the finale showed President Grace Penn announcing at the G7 summit in Tuscany that the United States would open fire on any country that obstructed its ships. Ambassador Kate Wyler walked off the stage, handed in her badge and left. Billie Appiah and Miguel Ganon followed her. Then the vice president — her husband.
Grace Penn had to threaten the allies only once to lose half her administration. Trump has threatened to annex Canada and seize Greenland, the territory of a NATO ally. In October, he struck a diesel deal with Putin and demanded that Kyiv spare Russian refineries. In Washington, dissent is still expressed in letters. For resignations broadcast live, you need a Netflix subscription.
That same Thursday, US intelligence was due to hold its first classified briefing for state election officials on threats to the vote in more than two years. The briefing was cancelled because officials could not establish a secure connection. The Kremlin has no such problem.
The Reckoning
In the Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted between 17 and 20 September 2026, Trump’s approval rating fell to 32%, the lowest of his political career. On his handling of the cost of living, his electoral showpiece, he scores just 17%. The war with Iran and rising fuel prices have presented him with the bill. And promises are not accepted as payment.
The Pew Research Center puts his approval rating at 30%. Polymarket gives Democrats a 63% chance of winning both chambers. The Pythia of Delphi consulted the gods; today, people consult the polls. The oracles change, but the desire to be told that the future will prove us right remains.
But the most revealing figures are not about approval. They concern whom Americans believe the presidency is meant to serve. In the AP-NORC poll, conducted between 24 and 28 September and published on 13 October, 56% believe Trump has given a great deal of priority to his own business interests, and 54% to those of friends and family. Only 23% think he has put the country as a whole first; just 11% believe he has prioritised people like them. As for profits made through the presidency, 41% suspect illegal conduct, while another 18% consider it unethical, though not illegal. At this point, the question is not merely how much support Trump has left, but how much of the presidency Americans believe has been put at the president’s own service.
Viewed from Europe, those numbers seem far too forgiving. According to the Pew Research Center, in eight of the ten European countries surveyed between February and May 2026, around three in four citizens, or more, have no confidence in Trump. For the European Council on Foreign Relations, in May only 11% of Europeans still considered the United States an ally. Across the Atlantic, by contrast, almost one American in three continues to approve of him. Salmoneus’s special effects evidently still have their niche audience.
At home, support is draining away even among Republicans: 31% of those who voted for him in 2024 now disapprove of him. Trump has promised so much and delivered so little that his own voice has become an electoral liability. He has only one move left to improve his poll numbers, the one he has never tried: silence.
In Brussels, Tokyo and Ottawa, they have started counting down on the calendar: from the 3 November 2026 vote to 20 January 2029, when the next president takes office, there are 809 days to go. Cronus, too, eventually ended up in Tartarus. Time, unlike the gods, does not need to be impressed: it simply passes.
All his mythological masks come with an ending already written. Salmoneus was incinerated, along with his city, for trying to pass himself off as Zeus. Midas got his wish and discovered that a fulfilled desire cannot be eaten. Tantalus remains suspended between water that retreats and fruit that slips from his grasp. Three different punishments for the same presumption: confusing power with omnipotence.
Virgil had already found the formula: non imitabile fulmen. The thunderbolt cannot be imitated with impunity. On 3 November, it will be the voters, not the gods, who decide what this grotesque spectacle has cost.
Mythological sources: Apollodorus, Library I.9.7; Virgil, Aeneid VI.585–594; Hyginus, Fabulae 61; Homer, Odyssey XI.582–592 and Pindar, Olympian Ode I (Tantalus); Ovid, Metamorphoses XI.85–145 (Midas). Journalistic and documentary sources: US Supreme Court, Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump (20 February 2026); FactCheck.org (10 September 2026); Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget; US Census Bureau; White House and CMS, Medicare payments (2–3 October 2026); US Customs and Border Protection, statements to the Court of International Trade (August 2026); Associated Press and Reuters on payments and investigations into voting; Atlanta Journal-Constitution and NPR on the seizure of election materials in Fulton County; US Department of Justice; CalMatters and Shasta Scout on Shasta County; Votebeat (17 April 2026); Reuters/Ipsos (1 September, 21 September and 5 October 2026); Research Co. (13–15 January 2026); Pew Research Center (8 October 2026); AP-NORC (13 October 2026); Pew Research Center (23 June 2026) and ECFR (10 June 2026) on European public opinion; Reuters (18 July 2026) on Mojtaba Khamenei’s statement; US Treasury (26 March 2026) on the presidential signature on banknotes; Reuters (13 July 2026) on the federal budget deficit for June and tariff refunds; Reuters (11, 13 and 16 October 2026), Al Jazeera (11 October 2026) and the New York Times (10 October 2026) on the Russian diesel deal and attacks on refineries; Reuters Breakingviews, Hugo Dixon (19 October 2026); New York Times (18 September and 16 October 2026), Graphika and Alethea on Russian influence operations; CNN (15 October 2026); Netflix, The Diplomat, season 4, episode 8, “Warships” (15 October 2026).
